THE DIARY

In July 1945 Otto Frank receives tragic news. He hears that Anne and Margot have died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Then Miep Gies gives him Anne’s diaries, notebooks and loose papers. She and Bep had found the papers after the arrest in the secret annexe. Miep had been keeping them for Anne for a long time. Otto Frank thought it was a miracle that Anne’s diary had been saved. At first he didn’t want to read it. He felt too much grief. Later he began to read it, slowly, each day a little more.

He was surprised at his daughter. It was a completely different Anne from the Anne he had known. There were all kinds of things in her diary which she had never told him. Otto Frank also read that Anne had planned to write a book after the war about her experiences in the secret annexe. He also discovered that she had already rewritten large parts of her diary on loose sheets of coloured paper for that book.

‘The Secret Annexe’
Otto Frank let some of his friends and relatives read Anne’s diary. They thought it was very special, and so Otto decided to have a real book made of it. This was published two years later, first in the Netherlands but later in many other countries too, with the title ‘The Secret Annexe’. People all over the world wanted to read ‘The Secret Annexe’.

Names
In the book, the van Pels family, Fritz Pfeffer and the helpers were given different names, which Anne had made up. She decided to call the van Pels family the van Daan family. She called Fritz Pfeffer Albert Dussel. Miep Gies became Miep van Santen, Bep Voskuijl became Elli Vossen, Johannes Kleiman was Simon Koophuis, Victor Kugler was Harry Kraler, and so on. Otto Frank used these names as far as possible. In later editions of ‘The Secret Annexe’ (from 1991 onwards) the helpers are referred to by their real names.